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6.04.2011

Flash Back Friday - Pizza Party

Sorry for the late edition, my Internet has been a bit spotty. As I write this I have 5 little girls watching a movie in their pajamas tucked into sleeping bags. This is the year sleep overs have officially started in our house! It has actually made it easy to make the birthday party low key (yes, JuneBug's birthday was 2 months ago... it took this long to organize a night when all her main buddies could be here).
I try to alternate years between big parties and low key parties. It helps reduce trying to out do the last party with a bigger and better one. My girls can then focus in on who their best buds are and really think about who they are closest to.

A Pizza Party Birthday

While I've done stamped and other types of custom cards in the past, a favorite of my crew is to make photo card invites. JuneBug had fun dressing up for the picture and we made up a poem together and ordered them online. Since we'd decided on a pizza theme, she wore a chef's hat and apron and held a bowl and spoon in front of our red kitchen wall (pizza theme just screams red to me... tomato sauce maybe?).

On the day of the party, as the girls arrived they each got a canvas apron to decorate with permanent markers (if I ever do this again, I will probably make the aprons, the only plain canvas ones I found were so cheaply made I sewed half of them back together before the party even started!). This worked great because their was room to spread out the aprons with only a few girls at a time. Mainly they all signed each others and drew little doodles in between. They were all thrilled with it! We also had chef hats for them to wear.

A pizza party requires pizza! Each guest go a personal sized pizza crust to top however they wanted. Obviously sauce and cheese were a part of the spread but we also had pepperoni, ham, onions, green peppers, pineapple and grilled chicken. I was surprised how many kids divided their pizza up and tried different combinations, especially after their uncertainty as to the choices!

A few years back I stopped trying to organize too many party games since the kids seem to just want to play together, so we sent them all down the basement to play while the pizzas baked. Note to self: there needs to be a plan or system for remembering which child made which pizza...

We got it figured out eventually!

Instead of a cake we made pizza cookies, yumm-o. What's a pizza cookie? I thought you'd never ask!

I made large sugar cookies, topped with pink frosting (too much red food coloring makes it taste funny and JuneBug likes pink, go with it). Topping time! For the real pizzas I made little signs on Popsicle sticks to label everything. At first I had great ideas of all types of candies to look like the real toppings but came down to m&ms... why, well, do you know a kid who doesn't like m&ms? I didn't think so. We sorted the m&ms by color and then used the same type of signs. The part of cheese was played by coconut.
Green - green peppers
yellow - onions or pineapple
red - pepperoni
brown - sausage
orange - ham
blue - I don't remember what the blue ones were... if they still had the old original colors with the two shades of brown it probably would have been easier. I did consider getting the bags of individual colors but didn't think the cost difference was worth it. The blue ones were gone first since they all thought it was funny to have blue food on their pizzas (again, go with it).

When it was time to leave, I took a picture with JuneBug and each of her friends individually wearing their aprons and chef hats. JuneBug wrote out a simple thank you to each of her friends and I had single cards made out of each picture with the personalized thank you typed on each picture.

It's been a few hours since I started typing this post... the sleepover is officially a success... they are all sleeping!

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